Legal Information Retrieval System Research Articles

Automated Citation Analysis and Visualization for Supreme Court Judgements

This paper proposes an innovative method for facilitating access to Supreme Court decisions through citation analysis. Leveraging natural language processing tools like the Gensim and NLTK libraries, our approach retrieves relevant documents and paragraphs from two distinct datasets: one representing current judgments and the other serving as a reference corpus. Through comprehensive testing and evaluation, we validate the reliability and efficacy of our methodology in extracting pertinent judgments. Our findings underscore how this system can streamline legal research, providing users with valuable insights and credible sources to bolster their analyses and arguments. Additionally, we discuss future research avenues and potential applications, underscoring the significance of citation analysis in legal information retrieval systems.

Intelligent Auxiliary Framework for the Development Path of Modern Shipbuilding Enterprises Based on Intelligent Legal Information Retrieval System

Intelligent Auxiliary Framework for the Development Path of Modern Shipbuilding Enterprises Based on Intelligent Legal Information Retrieval System

Semantic matching based legal information retrieval system for COVID-19 pandemic.

Recently, the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is severe in the entire world. The prevention and control of crimes associated with COVID-19 are critical for controlling the pandemic. Therefore, to provide efficient and convenient intelligent legal knowledge services during the pandemic, we develop an intelligent system for legal information retrieval on the WeChat platform in this paper. The data source we used for training our system is "The typical cases of national procuratorial authorities handling crimes against the prevention and control of the new coronary pneumonia pandemic following the law", which is published online by the Supreme People's Procuratorate of the People's Republic of China. We base our system on convolutional neural network and use the semantic matching mechanism to capture inter-sentence relationship information and make a prediction. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary learning process to help the network better distinguish the relation between two sentences. Finally, the system uses the trained model to identify the information entered by a user and responds to the user with a reference case similar to the query case and gives the reference legal gist applicable to the query case.

Legal Information Retrieval System with Entity-Based Query Expansion: Case study in Traffic Accident Litigation

This article describes an information retrieval system with entity query expansion by relevance feedback.The performance of the system is tested assuming its usage as a support tool for lawyers constructing a legalframework for a case. The objective is to improve the precision of results when searching for relevantjurisprudence. For this, the entities belonging to a knowledge base are used as a means to expand thequery. The expansion can be done using either an automatic or an interactive mechanism. This secondapproach suggests to the user concepts related to the query, which might improve the search experience. Anontology and a knowledge base, called LegalOnto and LegalBase, respectively, were developed. The ontology includes concepts not addressed by existing legal ontologies, and the knowledge base integrates LegalOnto with the thesaurus of the Argentine System of Legal Information (Sistema Argentino de Informacion ´Jur´ıdica: SAIJ), enriched in the subject of traffic accidents. Quantitative experimentation is carried out upon aset of court documents that are used to populate the knowledge base. Preliminary results are encouraging.

Citation Metrics for Legal Information Retrieval: Scholars and Practitioners Intertwined?

AbstractThis paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

A user-centred analysis of decision support requirements in legal informatics

Accurate, target-oriented, and timely information is a strategic input in effective decision-making for a plethora of actors within society. The exponential growth in the amount of legal data generated, collected, stored and processed in today's digitalised world, and its emergence as an essential input in everyday interactions, compels us to take a fresh look at how information is not only accessed, but also used to take important decisions that affect the governance of society, and calls for an examination of the development of those sophisticated computer systems that facilitate the process. This research article aims to critically explore the ways in which the legal information needs of different groups of actors within society translate into enhanced interactions with a sophisticated legal information retrieval system, and result in effective data-driven decision making for better governance. To do so, five user stories outlining the various ways in which five archetypal users of an advanced legal information system may interact with a document-driven platform, and use its functionalities to take key decisions pertaining to their everyday personal and professional lives, are presented and critically examined. The article offers the reader a comprehensive way of identifying and analysing legal data stakeholder groups and their requirements, as well as the importance of these requirements per target group. It also seeks to further the identification of advanced services connected to these stakeholder groups covering the demand-side of decision support.

Design of a Computer-Based Legal Information Retrieval System.

In today's society, people's lives are increasingly inseparable from computer information. Due to the continuous improvement of technology and the rapid development of internet technology, the network environment is becoming more and more complex, which makes it easy to cause loopholes in the information retrieval system when people use the network. Therefore, it is especially important to search for legal knowledge by computer. In order to adapt to this change and demand, we need a retrieval system to provide the corresponding search function, legal information content, and management and other services, so as to achieve the purpose of computer legal information retrieval. The legal information retrieval system is computer based, draws conclusions from the analysis of relevant data, and then applies them to judicial trial cases, criminal investigations, and other fields to provide a reference for relevant legal issues. The system is designed to combine computer technology with a criminal investigation and other fields, and then analyze the data to draw the corresponding conclusions. The retrieval algorithms used are mainly image and content retrieval algorithms, and image retrieval algorithms mainly use image segmentation technology, while content retrieval algorithms mainly use the cuckoo algorithm. At present, the information construction and economic and social development in China have become one of the issues of common concern and need to be solved by all countries in the world. The study of the legal information retrieval system is of great importance in the construction of information technology and the development of economic society.

Legal Information Retrieval systems: State-of-the-art and open issues

In the last years, the legal domain has been revolutionized by the use of Information and Communication Technologies, producing large amount of digital information. Legal practitioners’ needs, then, in browsing these repositories has required to investigate more efficient retrieval methods, that assume more relevance because digital information is mostly unstructured. In this paper we analyze the state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence approaches for legal domain, focusing on Legal Information Retrieval systems based on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction techniques. Finally, we also discuss challenges – mainly focusing on retrieving similar cases, statutes or paragraph for supporting latest cases’ analysis – and open issues about Legal Information Retrieval systems.

Statistical Properties of Legal Texts and their use in Legal Information Retrieval Systems

The article is devoted to issues related to the use of statistical properties of legal texts for searching legal information. Methods are presented that allow to enlarge the set of found documents by including those semantically close to the initially found ones. Providing the ability to search for such collections of documents allows to better satisfy the needs of the system users. The article presents the theoretical foundations of enlargement operations based on performing specific treatments in the so-called semantic space of terms and semantic space of documents. The article deals particularly with the methods which allow to determine the set of similar documents by using statistical properties of documents. The research carried out under the ERASMUS program conducted by K. van Noortwijk and R. V. de Mulder is presented in detail. A critical analysis of the measures used in this research was carried out, as well as an analysis of the reasons why the proposed methods didn’t lead to fully satisfactory results.

Использование компьютерных методов и систем в изучении права, интеллектуальном анализе и моделировании правовой деятельности: систематический обзор

Integration of computing systems and methods in legal activity allows to extract benefits such as resource saving, increase objectivity, completeness and accuracy of intellectual results. Understanding of the main scientific achievements and trends at the intersection of computer and legal sciences focuses on promising scientific and technological areas of informatization of law. This review systematizes the most important achievements at the intersection of legal and computer sciences, covering foreign and domestic scientific publications for 1949–2020. Researches of computer methods and systems initiated by American jurimetrics were aimed at storing, indexing, abstracting and searching for legal texts and led to the creation of legal information retrieval systems. Domestic legal cybernetics became a pioneer in the field of automation of criminalistics expert examination. Computer modeling of legal reasoning developed on the techniques of artificial intelligence, later it shifted to the field of legal dialogue and conflict of legal arguments, but in recent years it transforms the acquired experience on the basis of modern computer models, patterns and architectures. The popularization of decision-making support systems has provided multi-tasking systems, including information retrieval, legal reasoning, analytics, predictions and control. The latest research segments are focused on the application of machine learning and big data processing. Almost all successful methodological solutions retain their significance, continuing to be applied directly or as the basis for the further development of computational methods and information systems in legal activity.

Similarity analysis of court judgments using clustering of case citation data: a study

Information retrieval (IR) is an automatic mechanism to extract required information from a collection of unstructured or semi-structured data. IR systems minimize the effort of a user to locate the information based on the requirements. Clustering of documents is carried out as a preprocessing step for filtering irrelevant information in an IR system. Legal domain is a producer as well as consumer of huge in-formation which also contains invaluable legal knowledge and its interpretation. Knowledge based legal information retrieval systems is need of the day. Citation analysis is a technique to find the hidden relationships between the documents and is used for understanding knowledge transfer across various domains and hence becomes very important in legal domain. In this study, similarities among documents are analyzed using data clustering when applied on data of citations in court judgments.

The failure of an early episode in the open government data movement: A historical case study

The open government data (OGD) movement that focuses on government transparency and data reuse did not appear out of thin air. Some early episodes of this social movement can be traced to the early 1990s.This paper presents a historical case study of such an OGD episode, a campaign targeted at a government database called JURIS, initiated by OGD advocates in the early 1990s. JURIS was a legal information retrieval system created by the Department of Justice and used by government employees, which contained federal court decisions (or case law), among many other primary legal materials. Public interest groups and small publishers intended to open up the database for public access and data reuse, but their effort failed and eventually led to the shutdown of the JURIS system. This paper provides a detailed account of the history, analyzes the reasons of the failure, and discusses outcomes of the campaign. Drawing from social movement theories, especially the political opportunity structure, the paper illustrates the complexity of the social political environment surrounding the OGD movement, especially with regard to an important type of government data, primary legal information, in the United States.

On the concept of relevance in legal information retrieval

The concept of ‘relevance’ is crucial to legal information retrieval, but because of its intuitive understanding it goes undefined too easily and unexplored too often. We discuss a conceptual framework on relevance within legal information retrieval, based on a typology of relevance dimensions used within general information retrieval science, but tailored to the specific features of legal information. This framework can be used for the development and improvement of legal information retrieval systems.

Evaluation of Diversification Techniques for Legal Information Retrieval

“Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximizing access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law”. In accordance with the aforementioned declaration on free access to law by legal information institutes of the world, a plethora of legal information is available through the Internet, while the provision of legal information has never before been easier. Given that law is accessed by a much wider group of people, the majority of whom are not legally trained or qualified, diversification techniques should be employed in the context of legal information retrieval, as to increase user satisfaction. We address the diversification of results in legal search by adopting several state of the art methods from the web search, network analysis and text summarization domains. We provide an exhaustive evaluation of the methods, using a standard dataset from the common law domain that we objectively annotated with relevance judgments for this purpose. Our results: (i) reveal that users receive broader insights across the results they get from a legal information retrieval system; (ii) demonstrate that web search diversification techniques outperform other approaches (e.g., summarization-based, graph-based methods) in the context of legal diversification; and (iii) offer balance boundaries between reinforcing relevant documents or sampling the information space around the legal query.

Implementation of information and communication technologies when preparing future lawyers

Implementation and application of cloud computing technologies at all stages of the learning process, regardless the studying discipline, preparation of the competent specialist for further professional activities are the main objectives of the university. In the article were investigated the ways of forming computing competencies by reviewing and improving practical skills of students from law faculties in information and electronic databases, online legal information retrieval systems using cloud storage. The main object of the article is a process of teaching students, the subject – information and communication technologies for trainings. It is necessary to pay attention on the necessity of implementing ICT training to the studying process by applying modern software and technologies for its future usage in professional activity. Methods: experimental investigating the process of implementing partly-searched and problem oriented materials in studying process. Expected results: higher level of the student professional skills in using electronic, information and legal databases and cloud computing technologies. Developed an outline for the lesson of the course “Modern Information Technologies” to form a computing competencies in 1st year students of the Law faculty. This development allows to improve the methods of implementing ICT in a future lawyers studying process.

The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis

Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system's headnote classification of case law, started back in the nineteenth century, was and is the creation of humans. The retrospective headnote classification of the cases in Lexis's case databases, started in 1999, was created primarily—although not exclusively—with computer algorithms. So how do these two very different systems deal with a similar headnote from the same case, when they link the headnote to the digest and citator functions in their respective databases? This article continues the author's investigation into this question, looking at the relevance of results from digest and citator searches run on matching headnotes in Westlaw and Lexis for ninety important federal and state cases, to see how each system performs. For digests, where the results are curated and a human has made a judgment about the meaning of a case and placed it in a classification system, humans still have an advantage. For citators, where algorithm is battling algorithm to find relevant results, it is a matter of the better algorithm winning. But neither algorithm is doing a very good job of finding all the relevant results; the overlap between the two citator systems is not that large. The lesson for researchers: Know how your legal research system was created; what involvement, if any, humans had in the curation of the system; and what a researcher can and cannot expect from the system being used.

Online Legal Information Systems in India: a Case Study from the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi

AbstractIn this digital age, users require immediate access to information. To foster the process of research, the legal fraternity demands efficient online legal information systems. Raj Kumar Bhardwaj provides a view from India and reports on a case study that has been conducted on the use of various legal information databases in the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, India. In his paper, he also reviews and discusses the various aspects relating to legal information retrieval systems, with particular reference to the various essential legal databases that cover Indian law.

Who had access to JURIS?: A failed case of open access

In the early 1990s, public interest groups and small legal publishers attempted to push for the public access to federal court decisions contained in JURIS, a legal information retrieval system used for in-house searching by government employees. This early open access effort to free the law not only failed, but eventually led to the shutdown of the JURIS system. This paper presents the findings of a historical investigation into the shutdown of the JURIS system. It argues that the open access movement involves complicated social negotiations—many factors were involved in shaping access rights to primary legal information in digital format. The factors leading to the failure of the open access request included relevant government agencies' indifference about information dissemination, the involvement of commercial information providers' interests, and the ambiguity of the copyrightability of case law information. This study contributes to the broader OA/OK debates by presenting a failed case in the early stage of open access movement and by summarizing the lessons learned from this failed case.

New school case law knowledge management

Knowledge management has become increasingly important in all organisations and those that are active in the legal field in particular. Information technology is playing an increasingly significant role within knowledge management. This article deals with knowledge management in the field of case law, as it is vital for lawyers to keep abreast of (or to 'monitor') judicial decisions. It addresses the use of information technology to provide and disseminate knowledge about case law. It examines methods for knowledge management that are helpful in the context of extensive databases but will also be of use in systems where there is not yet an abundance of digitally available case law. The solution is seen in terms of the jurimetrical analysis of case law, supported by conceptual legal information retrieval systems. The relative lack of interest in jurimetrics that has characterised the 'old school' approach to law must now give way to the 'new school' approach, where such new technology is embraced and put to effective use.

A Methodology to Create Legal Ontologies in a Logic Programming Based Web Information Retrieval System

Web legal information retrieval systems need the capability to reason with the knowledge modeled by legal ontologies. Using this knowledge it is possible to represent and to make inferences about the semantic content of legal documents. In this paper a methodology for applying NLP techniques to automatically create a legal ontology is proposed. The ontology is defined in the OWL semantic web language and it is used in a logic programming framework, EVOLP+ISCO, to allow users to query the semantic content of the documents. ISCO allows an easy and efficient integration of declarative, object-oriented and constraint-based programming techniques with the capability to create connections with external databases. EVOLP is a dynamic logic programming framework allowing the definition of rules for actions and events. An application of the proposed methodology to the legal web information retrieval system of the Portuguese Attorney General's Office is described.